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In a ruling of 3 March 2000 (case no. 10 O 457/99), the Landgericht Bonn (Bonn District Court) decided that an Internet user could only be banned from a chatroom if he or she had expressly broken the common code of conduct (known as "chatiquette"). The District Court rejected the application of a chatroom operator, who had wanted to ban the defendant from his virtual business premises. The defendant had been involved in an argument with another chatroom user. The applicant prohibited the defendant from using his chatroom, but the latter subsequently ignored the ban. The applicant claimed that,...

There have been some important legal developments in the field of business TV and Internet radio in Germany recently. While n-tv has been operating a business television station for a large German bank since the beginning of April, Deutsche Telekom AG started its own "Telekom-TV" channel at the CeBIT 2000 exhibition. Furthermore, at the end of February, Chart-Radio, previously only available on the Internet, was awarded a licence by the Baden-Württemberg Landesmedienanstalt für Kommunikation (Regional Communications Authority - LfK). Both business-TV and Internet radio must be classified as teleservices,...

Following the decision of the Landgericht Mainz (Mainz District Court - LG) of 23 March 2000, the television broadcaster SAT.1 may finally show the programme Der Fall Lebach ("The Lebach Case"), which was supposed to be the pilot film of the series Verbrechen, die Geschichte machten ("Crimes that made history"). The judgement followed different rulings by the Oberlandesgerichte Saarbrücken & Koblenz (Saarbrücken and Koblenz Courts of Appeal) and a decision by the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court - BVerfG) (see IRIS 2000-1: 9). The Federal Constitutional Court had lifted the...

In two decisions reached on 21 March 2000, the European Commission has authorised the acquisition by CLTUFA of shares in German television broadcaster VOX and BSkyB's merger with KirchPayTV. The Commission had previously approved CLT-UFA's shareholding in VOX, which it considered to be part of the CLT-UFA group. Since, for this reason, CLT-UFA's market share remained unchanged, the Commission decided, on the basis of Article 6.1.b of Regulation 4064/89/EEC, amended by Regulation 1310/97/EC, that its acquisition of further shares in VOX could be considered compatible with the Common Market. On...

In 1998, the European Commission had prohibited the planned merger of Telekom and Beta Research (see IRIS 1998-6: 14). This decision had largely been based on the fear that Deutsche Telekom would, in the long term, monopolise access to cable services and that d-box technology would more or less become a standard prerequisite for the use of digital TV in German-speaking countries. Responding to public criticism of the latest attempt to merge with Beta Research, Deutsche Telekom referred to the fact that, in the meantime, the first contract to operate the cable network in Nordrhein-Westfalen had...